Reading about and using the Amazon Web Services, I'm not really able to grasp how to use it correctly. Sorry about the long question:
I have a EC2 instance which mostly does the work of a web server (apache for file sharing and Tomcat with Play Framework for the web app). As it's a web server, the instance is running 24/7.
It just came to my attention that the data on the EC2 instance is non persistent. This means I lose my database and files if it's stopped. But I guess it also means my server settings and installed applications are lost as they are just files in the same way as the other data.
This means that I will either have to rewrite the whole app to use amazon CloudDB or write some code which stores the db on S3 and make my own AMI with the correct applications installed and configured. Or can this be quick-fixed by using EBS somehow?
My question is 1. is my understanding of aws is correct? and 2. is it's worth it? It could be a possibility to just set up a regular dedicated server where everything is persistent, as you would expect. Would love to have the scaleability of aws though..
If you use an EBS volume with your EC2 instance, you can mount/dismount them to have persistent storage. You can also use Amazon RDS to handle your database too which is handy (but can be slightly on the pricier side.)
So a way to think of it is:
Your EC2 instance: Get the OS set up exactly like you'd like it along with your web application - basically, get your static stuff all in place.
EBS volume: That can be mounted and can be used for things like user uploads.
RDS instance: This is a dedicated database server with no hassles. It's nice - I use a MySQL RDS and it automatically makes two daily backups, and is scalable like EC2 instances.
Amazon Web Service is a better approach at hosting your applications Jon. You have a basic understand of AWS but you need to know that you can also launch an instance that is persistent. Just launch an instance of a persistence AMI. Also you can install you database,webs server on the instance like a regular server. There is probably just minimal differences from running an Ec2 instance and a dedicated server. If you have any other questions you can contact me.
Related
We are currently setting up AWS hosting for our Web Application.
This Laravel Web Application will have a Schema per company that registers, meaning it will have a large sized mySql server.
I have gone through the motions of setting up a VPC with EC2 instances and and RDS for this mySql server.
However we are currently looking at using Laravel Forge as a tool to host.
What Forge does differently is that it includes the mySql Server on the EC2 instance not on an RDS.
The question I have come to ask here is, what are the implications if any of having the mySql server on the EC2 instance rather then an RDS.
Would there be performance issues?
Is it better practice to have an RDS?
Or is Forges out the box way of packaging this all together on an EC2 server fine?
By running this on an EC2 instance you will taking more of the responsibility of managing the database, not just installation but also patching, backups, recovery. Harder to maintain functionality such as replication and HA will also be on you to implement and monitor.
By running on RDS AWS is going to take the heavy lifting of this and implement a best practice version of MySQL which offers the flexibility of allowing you to run a MySQL stack in the cloud without having to really think about the implementation details under the hood other than deciding do you want it to be HA and how many replicas do you want.
In saying this by using RDS you're also giving up the ability to run it however you want, you are limited to the versions of the database that RDS supports (although this is now quite soon after release). In addition not all plugins or extensions will be active so check this functionality before deciding.
I am very new to the Amazon AWS services. I was wondering if there is a way to run an instance of EC2 (say, Amazon Linux AMI) and then connect two environments to this instance.
Particularly, I'd like to run a PHP and a Tomcat environment on a single EC2 instance.
The problem is, every time I create a new environment in Elastic Beanstalk, it seems to create a new EC2 instance as well. Am I missing something here?
I'd appreciate any hint on this.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is designed for deploying your running apps in a way that is designed for scalability from the ground-up. Because of this, Elastic Beanstalk will launch one or more EC2 instances, connect them to an Elastic Load Balancer instance, configure CloudWatch monitoring and Auto Scaling triggers.
Also, because of its fundamental design for scalability, Elastic Beanstalk is designed around a one-app-per-environment model (whereby "environment", I mean one of these EC2 + ELB + CloudWatch + AutoScaling clusters).
Since running two separate web servers with two separate apps (PHP & Java) is not a fundamentally scalable design, it's not a use-case that Elastic Beanstalk is optimized for.
You are free to spin-up a standalone EC2 instance and install whatever you'd like on it, but you're right — git aws.push support has not been made available for standalone EC2 instances. If the git support is important to you, you'll need to weigh the pros and cons of each approach.
I would also like to be able to do this, basically from a cost perspective for demos etc.
For example, a single instance with one PHP app and one Java app. Or, a single instance with two Java apps.
However, from what I have read so far in the Elastic Beanstalk developer guide, I have not found anything explicitly stating that multiple applications per environment is supported (or even, multiple environments per EC2 instance - if that even makes sense).
It makes me wonder if this is a feature that is often requested and planned for the future, or alternatively if the single-app-per-environment model is 'by design' for some reason.
I am currently experimenting with Amazon EC2 and use standard ec2 console. The web app is ok but I want a better solution. I want to be able to ssh to the instances, monitor them, possibly attach with a debugger etc. Are there any better alternatives to the tool?
You should be able to login to any EC2 instance via SSH using key files and work with it like if it were an ordinary server. To do it you have to create a key pair, download public key to your local machine, and ensure you've selected that key-pair while launching new instance. You are free to install any software you like on the instance, so the way how you would monitor you instance is completely up to you (if you decide not to use AWS console).
Apart from the web console there are also Amazon EC2 API tools (a bunch of ec2 scripts to be run from Linux console) and the Query API. The later is considered to be the most flexible way to manage your cloud infrastructure. There are binding for EC2 in many scripting languages including Python (boto), Perl (Net::Amazon::EC2), Ruby (amazon-ec2 gem), node.js (aws2js).
Otherwise there's no better solution just because EC2 is IaaS service and it is meant to be equally good for almost any task. For your particular needs you'll have to develop or organize your own environment which will suite your unique needs.
Edit:
Since today it is possible to log in to running EC2 Linux instances from AWS web console:
Our third announcement today is about a new feature in the AWS console that makes it even easier for you to use Amazon EC2 Linux instances. Customers have been asking us to enable the ability to log into their instances directly from the AWS console. Starting today, you can log in to your Linux instances from the EC2 console without the need to install additional software clients. Please see the Amazon EC2 Getting Started Guide for details on how to use this new functionality.
I am about to migrate a large web project (many sites using common data) to EC2 and i wondered what would be the best setup (I am very much a newbie with Amazon AWS).
The site pages are rebuilt by scripts once a week and the resultant static pages are served (currently about 7 to 10k views a day). Inbetween the weekly builds I would like to access the db to add/edit data.
I am thinking either EC2 + RDS or EC2 and S3 (S3 having the advantage of keeping a copy of the static pages too). Do these options sound reasonable, based on what I have mentioned?
Thanks in advance
We're using EC2 (experimtented with a few instance types just to learn cpu extra large worked best for our type of application), and rather than using RDS we extensively use EBS -
one EBS for running code, one EBS which holds mysql database files.
S3 is used for incremental backups mostly- as the EBS can be mounted on any other instance easily.
When autoscaling my EC2 instances for application, what is the best way to keep every instances in sync?
For example, there are custom settings and application files like below...
Apache httpd.conf
php.ini
PHP source for my application
To get my autoscaling working, all of these must be configured same in each EC2 instances, and I want to know the best practice to sync these elements.
You could use a private AMI which contains scripts that install software or checkout the code from SVN, etc.. The second possibility to use a deployment framework like chef or puppet.
The way this works with Amazon EC2 is that you can pass user-data to each instance -- generally a script of some sort to run commands, e.g. for bootstrapping. As far as I can see CreateLaunchConfiguration allows you to define that as well.
If running this yourself is too much of an obstacle, I'd recommend a service like:
scalarium
rightscale
scalr (also opensource)
They all offer some form of scaling.
HTH